John Travis, MD, MPH

John W. Travis, MD, MPH completed his medical degree in Boston and a residency in general preventive medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Strongly influenced by Halbert Dunn, MD’s, 1961 classic, High-Level Wellness, which he discovered in 1972, he subsequently founded the first wellness center in the US (Wellness Resource Center, Mill Valley, CA, 1975) favorably portrayed in a 1979 60 Minutes segment with Dan Rather. The center was transformed into a non-profit educational foundation, Wellness Associates in 1980. He is the author of the Wellness Inventory Online (wellpeople.com), and three editions of the Wellness Workbook.

During the 80s and 90s, along with his wife, Meryn Callander, he focused on developing peer support networks of helping professionals that embraced a partnership model in order to reverse some of the negative effects of authoritarian model in the medical system. Realizing in 1991 that how we raise children has far more influence on their later wellness (and the estrangement that leads to dominator systems) than any other factor in our lives, he expanded the focus of his work to include infant wellness. Along with Meryn and 11 world experts in birth and child development he co-founded The Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children (aTLC.org), which fosters individual and planetary wellness through changing the norms of how babies are born and treated in their early years.

During the last decade, he has focused on bringing together all aspects of wellness within the concept of full-spectrum wellness, where the focus is on interconnectedness, both throughout all the stages of the human development, from conception to death, and within all levels of the environment around us—from inside our skin to the whole planet. He summarizes 38 years in the wellness field with the expression: The currency of wellness is connection. He was appointed an adjunct professor in the Master of Wellness program at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) University in 2008 and teaches Wellness Assessment in their online curriculum.

What if everything we thought and believed to be true turned out to be a story passed down from parent to child through daily, unconscious habits to ceremonial traditions, all designed to help us make sense of our world?

What if the chaos we are witnessing in and around us today is a symptom, evidence even, of an Old Story – the belief in our separateness – breaking down?

Would our fears be lessened and our curiosity piqued if we made a conscious choice to turn our attention toward an emerging New Story? Could an expanding sense of wonder allow room for questions like:

What if babies are conscious? What if sustainability begins with conception? What if Womb Ecology Becomes World Ecology?

When we consider the way we create meaning has always been through stories, other questions arise, like, Who wrote these stories? Can they be changed? What steps can we take toward shifting our current, industrial story of a disconnected humanity to a life-affirming and empowering narrative, authored, as always, by US?

Our daily choices and habits are informed by the context, the Big Picture, whether we are aware we even hold a worldview, a personal mythology or a story of our own being and becoming. This revelation is no sentimental notion, but a scientific fact of human conscious development.

Families for Conscious Living and its initiatives like Kindred Media have explored this New Story from the ground up – in grassroots’ communities – and from the top down – with frontier science researchers and social changemakers – for 20 years. FCL’s nonprofit work has been pioneered by families who have sought out insight and solutions to shifting their own awareness from the limits of the Old Story to the expansive, empowering practical wisdom heralded in the interconnected threads of the New Story. This New Story comes with its own language, phrases like Cultural Creatives, Bio-Cultural Conflict, Grounded Expansion, Harmonic Family Resonance, Phronesis and the Ecology of the Child.

What is needed at this time is a safe gathering place, a sanctuary, created with great compassion to inspire and welcome our imaginations to engage in open dialogue, create connected community and identify resources that support an adventurous exploration of holistic, peaceful and sustainable living.

Welcome to that safe gathering space.

Kindred readers are thoughtfully and courageously exploring the disintegration of the Old Story of Separation, the emergence of a New Story of Connection and the space we, as Cultural Creatives, now occupy between these stories. Kindred readers believe the human reach for wholeness as individuals and in community is always happening, even if we can’t find that story reflected in mainstream media outlets, cultural bias, authoritarian politics or our conformist society. This is the need Kindred fulfills as a nonprofit educational initiative: the need to inspire parents, practitioners and policy makers with the evidence of a world transforming through an independent, alternative media outlet that offers the most cutting-edge, holistic insights from the best conscious living authors, researchers, activists and nonprofits.

For a greater understanding of the The New Story, watch Kindred’s editor’s presentation here.

Visit our donation page to find a variety of ways to support Kindred – with legacy giving, monthly tax-deductible gifts, or in your daily online shopping and local dining activities.

Kindred Media and Community is an alternative media and educational initiative of the American 501C3 nonprofit Families for Conscious Living. Please visit our Guidestar page and Great Nonprofits to read our passionate reviews. FCL was awarded a Great Nonprofits Top-Rated Nonprofits seal in 2014, 2015 and 2016 and holds a Gold Level ranking of nonprofits at Guidestar.